SimpleSimon
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Posts posted by SimpleSimon
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Make sure you're distinguishing between snipers and designated marksman. The two of them have different jobs.
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Probably, but it's ironic that during the 1930s Britain assessed its stance against Italy with great pessimism. Unwarranted pessimism but nonetheless the British were really insecure about their dispositions in the Mediterranean. Malta and the Suez were not highlighted as assets but as vulnerabilities (the war would show both of them to be the former) but some of the depression in British military circles might also just have been British Generals pushing the government to spend more on them. I'm reading Fighters over the Fleet now and Friedman is inadvertently highlighting in the first chapter how poorly the British had assessed Italian capabilities. It seems as if the Italian military's bluster and boasting was successful, unfortunately for Italy, Mussolini also seems to have bought the rhetoric. He did internalize many of the facts too, but he was still very overly-optimistic in the sort of way someone with a self righteous fantasy of great destiny would be. It should've been obvious after Ethiopia that he intended to apply the Italian military to his problems but the Piedmontese Generals were more concerned with career advancement and winning peer rivalries than responsibly performing their duties as the regime's advisers. That right there is a lesson I think...
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Mussolini was an easy scapegoat who rightfully deserved much of the blame. If justice was a natural law though then Badoglio, Graziani, De Bono, and the rest of the Piedmontese Generals would've been arrested and locked up after the war. These are men who signed off on unprovoked bombing raids against Spain and commanded gas attacks against Ethiopian villages. Because they cooperated and then proudly characterized themselves as anti-communist after the war the Allies rewarded them with leniency they most certainly did not deserve. They should've all ended up in Spandau Prison along with Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer. This is just what happens when leaders substitute bluster for policy and violence for competence. The lesson of the 20th century to me is that war truly solves nothing, and is the last resort of stupid, irresponsible leaders.
I kind of left out the Italian Air Force too. Regia Aeronautica was an interesting little organization (emphasis on little.) It utterly embodied the Italian military's problem of only being able to grasp at the straws of the future rather than to fully hold it. Whereas the Luftwaffe only lost its supremacy after its enemies beat it out them the Regia Aeronautica arguably never held any to begin with. Against France or Britain it was hopelessly outmatched and against Yugoslavia it had nothing to bomb. Douhet was the ultimate proponent of the Strategic Air Offensive the USAAF and RAF so loved except that those two both had the resources to make it a reality and Italy did not.
This was certainly not for incompetence, Italian Aero Firms were industry leading and built all kinds of excellent airplanes. One must remember pre-war the Italians were fierce competitors with Britain over the Schneider Cup and the Italians designed and built some of the most powerful engines in the world in the 1920s. The Sparviero and SM81 were successful but expensive 3 engine aircraft and Italy built the only successful Strategic Bomber the Axis had at all during the war, the Piaggio P.108, but they only built 24 of them.
Making enough engines to equip fleets of fighters and bombers proved impossible for Italy and in the end they had to import German DB 600 engines frequently. As a result, the Regia Aeronautica could never form itself along the Douhetian lines it so revered and crucially this left it nearly bereft of the less ambitious but more attainable airplane designs that the Luftwaffe and Soviet Union loved so much, dive bombers, tactical bombers, and ground attack aircraft. These would've been absolutely crucial airplanes for making up the Italian Army's deficiencies in tactical artillery and anti-tank weaponry.
The CR32 and CR42 were the two best (and last) biplane fighters ever built and they could be surprisingly dangerous even to much newer designs. (A pair of P-38s were likely shot down by Fiat CR42s in 1944!) British pilots defending Malta remarked that getting into a dogfight on even terms with either of them in the Hurricane was a fatal mistake, but that as long as pilots took advantage of their speed they were better off. Bi-plane fighters were the product of a mentality that reflected the lessons of the last war. The belief that aerial battles were fought out in single huge furballs rather than an affair of drawn out attrition between airplanes that were incrementally outperforming and outnumbering each other with each new model. The later idea did not favor the capabilities of Italy and so of course it was not pursued but the former idea only worked as intended if your enemy played into it. This last thought returns us to the fundamental problem of Italy's thinking. Italian strategy would've worked flawlessly if all her enemies behaved exactly as she hoped they would 100% of the time...
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On 11/26/2018 at 4:37 PM, MikeyD said:
I recently read a US 'lessons learned' report from the North Africa campaign. I don't have it in front of me but two conclusions stuck out. The general penning the report said that Americans were too much into the cult of 'speed', relying on swift movement while giving short shrift to proper reconnoitering, then getting themselves into trouble as a result. Another point was that Americans were not sufficiently willing to make sacrifices (in blood, he meant) to accomplish the mission. Those conclusions can be scaled down to CM gameplay. We're expected to charge headlong into a built-up area, but if we take casualties about 15% we consider it a 'loss' regardless of the outcome.
The US Army could not stomach the same kind of body counts that were common on the Ostfront or even in China-Burma because of the precarious nature of the Grand Alliance and because it was fighting on the behalf of a Democracy, and was accountable to public opinion of the war. Americans were deeply skeptical of the "Germany First" strategy, which seemed an awful lot like a British ploy to get someone else to fight their war. The American public also deeply resented both the draft and the accompanying rations of raw materials and luxury foods like meat and dairy, even though this rationing was nowhere near as severe as in Britain or Germany. Despite all the "rah rah Pearl Harbor" bluster of the recruitment drives the fact is the American public's interest in the war was distant and its motivation to prosecute it minimal. The United States was directly threatened by precisely none of the Axis powers, and the public thought and cared little for the consequences of an Axis victory. American men in arms were seen as and saw themselves as "Citizen Soldiers", civilians in uniform, who were doing the Army and the Allies a big favor by being present at all. As a result, American strategy had to operate with great prudence because a "Stalingrad on the Rhine" would've been a completely unacceptable outcome for Roosevelt's administration and might well have reversed American commitment to the "Germany First" strategy agreed upon.
As a result, American Generals and Commanders were perceived to be operating under an excessive caution when really they were left little choice in how they fought by Washington. German Generals often noted the seemingly bizarre tendency of American Divisions to advance "one Brigade at a time" when really what the Americans were doing was just compartmentalizing their attacks so that a setback didn't turn into a major disaster. Nobody wanted to be the guy who lost a Company or a Regiment or God forbid a Division because the fact was right after they pinned the Medal on your chest for all that brave sacrifice you'd still be George Pickett in 1944. If your career has been in the US military and you planned on retiring from the US military than you did not want to be him.
Inversely, the US Army's special formations, its Armored Divisions, Combat Commands, and its much celebrated Airborne all tended to be very motivated and aggressive, to the point where they were almost dangerously reckless. The 82nd and 101st narrowly dodged total annihilation on more than one occasion and the Armored Divisions were notorious for leaving trails of knocked out Shermans up single highways (which Belton Cooper seized upon to claim in his book that the Sherman was a bad tank, and not just that American Armored Divisions were doing a bad job trying to ape the Blitzkrieg).
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2 hours ago, peter thomas said:
Question for those who know better than I - does the enemy AI - if you're playing against the AI - do any of these things? Not in such detail, right? Carefully organised fire and suppression or bounding overwatch? Does the AI do that? Does it even split squads? It will use the 'assault' command, I assume, but that's very ineffective compared to organising it yourself. Just wondering how much of an advantage you get if you play according to Bill's excellent suggestions? Play against the AI, I mean.
More or less. Try out some of the maps with AI attack plans and you'll see that, no, they do not explicitly conduct fire and maneuver the way the players do. Since the AI just follows a pre-planned time table and does not react to unexpected or unplanned moves you make. On the other hand, this is probably a bit more realistic than many give it credit for. I think we tend to downplay the player's omniscient super powers and extensive micro-management capabilities. Real troops didn't have me passing down my instant and perfect reception of battlefield details instantaneously like a hive mind. Of course many will also say with justification that the AI is unrealistically passive and stubborn. I think in the end the AI does conduct "attacks", but in a rather heavy-handed and predictable manner.
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8 hours ago, slysniper said:
Maneuver unit taking fire and being pinned, then it was not time to maneuver was it.
Pretty much. It seems to me like a lot of the time people just expect way too much of their Assault elements. It takes a lot of preparation, thorough preparation, for an infantry close assault to be successful which is often why it was not a preferred method of attack. It was more like something you did to mop up remains, not win battles.
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Delete triple post
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Delete triple post
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If field accounts and AARs are what you're looking for I advise lots of caution with them because the sources are often lacking context, or are less than impartial and you may end up with an inaccurate picture of how it all worked. The only book on tactics I would recommend is Rommel's book, Infantry Attacks. Compared to many authors he struck me as very fair and sober in his assessments, and recalled many details of his fights with great lucidity. Generals read his book for a reason.
If you're new to the game I would suggest starting small and only going big once you've mastered the basics. Start with scenarios on the Platoon or even Squad level, give yourself the responsibility of managing the small before going big. With enough experience you'll see all the similarities and differences between all the sides. Fundamentally you'll learn the two most important elements, the frequently inter-related duo of firepower and numbers, are the surest path to victory and how you apply them is what characterizes the sides.
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"The reality is the Afghan mujahideen did not defeat the Soviets on the battlefield. They won some important encounters, notably in the Panjshir valley, but lost others. In sum, neither side defeated the other. The Soviets could have remained in Afghanistan for several more years but they decided to leave when Gorbachev calculated that the war had become a stalemate and was no longer worth the high price in men, money and international prestige."
Sounds conspicuously like "losing" to me. I do believe that overall the war was not the major catastrophe for the Soviet Union often described as such by its enemies, and that it's connection to the USSR's demise is only nebulous, at best. The idea that the Soviet Union did not lose because they never suffered a major battlefield defeat is every bit as ridiculous as American posturing to the same tune over the Vietnam war. It's a gross oversimplification only the very narrow minded can rationalize I think. "Sure we lost millions of dollars, thousands of lives, and humiliated ourselves to the rest of the world diplomatically and militarily at the same time but since the Mujahideen failed to assassinate Gorbachev we are undefeated!!!!!"
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1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:
That's probably because you have many years of experience. Something that's a tough slog for you would seem like a malicious and unreasonable mission for people with a low-medium proficiency.
And that's a fundamental problem with CM scenario design. Scenarios are made by and for people who know the game like the back of their hand. That means there's a brutal learning curve for beginners and people with intermediate skill.
Also, replay value can be added by including several different AI setups. In "Pierrefitte", there are 5 different overall AI plans, and there are many variants of each plan, where various units choose from several pre-determined potential setup locations. I wish more scenarios used this option, because when I find a scenario I enjoy, I would like to replay it a couple of times.
Some of the scenarios in this game are just so insanely difficult that a real life military commander would probably consider them suicidal and an attack with the given units and support to be irresponsible. That said it's a game, not real life I get that sometimes people just want the difficulty. I would simply point out that it's less work to make scenarios harder than it is to make them easier. Removing units and support in the editor is easier than adding them and it's easier to balance. Less is more as they say.
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8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Crunch time sucks under any and all circumstances. Crunch time right before major Holidays sucks 10x worse. Even though we don't have corporate masters forcing us to work 100 hour weeks without extra pay, it's still not ideal
Take all the time you need as far as i'm concerned. I would also speak, if only for myself, that I would be willing to stomach higher prices for your games.
If any member of the team is not making enough money to support a comfortable life then as far as i'm concerned you all should be.
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31 minutes ago, kinophile said:
Calm down.
This forum doesn't need this kind of acidic negativity.
It's the the interwebs, lad. Nothing is real, nothing matters. Give the emotional outrage a rest.
You must've meant to this for Sgt. Squarehead who's reply to my post was that I was "talking out of my posterior". I agree he did seem quite angry.
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Quote
Actually, this is one of the biggest reason why I have stopped making new scenarios for the time being. The testing process is just exhausting and takes months, because every time you tweak something, you then need to wait for several pairs of people to play through the battle. Even then, there's no guarantee the final result will be balanced anyway, because it all depends on the skill levels of the random people who donate their free time to help do the tests.
Tbh I dispensed with playtesting a long time ago when I realized it was largely unnecessary. It was only necessary because I was designing super "top-heavy" scenarios where the removal or inclusion of single units would affect the balance of the map more dramatically then if their had been fewer units. Because their are more of them to affect. Do you understand? The consequences of including more units did not have the effect of reducing the magnitude of my mistakes but multiplying them exponentially because now more pixeltruppen were on the map to be affected by the consequences of that. Bulletpoint this was a balancing nightmare.
Now I don't publish my scenarios I play them with myself and my girlfriend (ex-military) because I don't get into making the briefings or preparing the other housekeeping items like considering core troops etc. Also many of my scenarios were essentially heavily modified stock scenarios because I found it very interesting to tweak the original scenarios and see what I got. I often kept going from there.
To tie all of this in with history, I would encourage you to keep in mind that what many of the maps highlighted as "Huge, Large, Medium, Small" etc you should always put a number of units on the map consistent with the next lower level of map size. (If you fill a Medium size map with units who can all cover and affect eachother, you need to place this scenario on a Large map.) Anything heavier represents a concentration of units on the map so abnormally dense that it would be part of a larger operation and supported appropriately. That's just what I got from my research.
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The timer is very important, arguably the chiefest source of stakes and tension in the games. Probably the most important element of its function is how simple and universal a measuring tool it is for overall performance. It'd be nice if scoring could be attached to it somehow so like accomplishing objectives sooner rather than any time in the mission would affect scoring.
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Before we get deep down this rabbit hole, some people seem to be purporting the fallacy that if you don't agree the scenario designing is hard work then you must think that it's effortless. I will say now that anyone who is pushing this line, especially any scenario designer, is being unfair.
I think making scenarios is hard, but it's NOT hard enough to respond to criticism the way Squarehead does. Nobody makes you design these scenarios and if you feel the community it too thankless for your taste I would encourage said designers to just not bother with it. Really, If that's how you feel then just do me a favor and don't exert yourself. Volunteer work does not entitle you to resent the game community and I have zero interest in engaging with people carrying a chip on their shoulder about it.
That the games ship with playable battles and campaigns is a great perk but its one im prepared to do without if the designers think theyre owed some kind of compensation for it...
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32 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:
Frankly I think you are talking out of your posterior.....Maybe craft us a scenario and show us how it's done.
Yeah you know what? I think scenario designing is hard, but it's not hard enough to entitle you to act like this. A child throwing a temper tantrum... If I was a simpler man reactions like yours would make me reconsider the sympathy I have left for the some of the designers, but I believe that most of them are not like you. So your...reaction, will not be held against anyone else.
Before I /ignore you Squarehead maybe you'll at least do yourself the dignity of answering my questions and naming some scenarios you designed? If you have any respect for your own work you will at least do this. It will also give me the opportinity to see if I was wrong about you. Up to you.
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1 hour ago, MarkEzra said:
But these artisans often feel handcuffed by the one absolutely uncontrollable factor-- The Player. How a player "feels" about a specific scenario-- its' balance, time, triggers, units, and objectives vary so widely as to be, in the end, somewhat useless. I grant that the novice designer can learn from creative advice. And Great designers can, too. But as a general rule the designer must follow his or hers' vision...Not the players.
If a designer feels handcuffed by the player then in my opinion, he's going about his designing the wrong way. His job to enable the player, to allow him to solve the puzzle he has placed before him and to equip him with the tools to do this. A designers "vision" sounds conspicuously like a script to me. A scripted scenario with a single expected outcome or approach is in my humble opinion, a bad scenario. If the designer is making a point about harsh war can be they are perfectly welcome to warn the player about that in the Notes or out of the back end of the scenario by scoring the player's actions fairly and not maliciously. I am at the end of my limit though for excuses. I am not a soldier, I am paying customer and I expect quality in the product I paid for. I get that the scenario designers see no compensation for their work that sucks, the editing tools are hard to use and time consuming. Nobody makes them do this however and you cannot convince me that balance is a lot of work when I've so frequently done it myself in minutes.
QuoteOne final thought (and what triggered me to write) There are NO lazy designers.
Certainly not. The work that goes into scenario designing is heavy. That's why it's so painful when a designer is either unable or unwilling to go through the last smidgen of effort necessary to ensure the scenario works, and not just excuse themselves with useless smug one liners "oh lol war is hell" or groundless claims about "research". These things infuriate me because they are not at all a proper or valid response to customer feedback. Instead, I just note who gets salty and make a point never to play their scenarios without reviewing them in the editor first. I should not have to do this, but i've been driven to it.
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10 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:
That sometimes operational level units are given less than perfect orders from above.
A childish excuse for what is just laziness on the part of the scenario designer. I am curious what scenarios you have been designing Squarehead if any? I just wan't to know who's scenarios I should be cracking open in the editor first before I waste any of my time trying to play through them. Should I include yours?
QuoteHow would you know?
It doesn't take a PhD to spot sloppy work. It doesn't even take a high school diploma to spot the salt of a bad craftsman who's realizes he's been caught by cheated customers. Don't you agree?
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Terrain objectives are ok as long as the scenario designer doesn't place them in a manner that forces the player to adopt a foolish strategy. I often saw lots of terrain objectives that were placed on things like open road junctions or required you to clear out an entire 1000mx1000m forest.... No commander, even the stupid ones, would actually put men on some of the Clear objectives we've had in these games. It's also insane to expect the player to clear out really big forests with so little time and so few tools to do it. Especially when in many cases commanders wouldn't even bother, they'd just cordon the forest off and move on. The given objectives are often placed in such a way that no one would value them.
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20 hours ago, nik mond said:
In WW2 unfortunately that might have been the reality too often from the Russian front to the Hurtgen forest, realistic commanders following orders from their unrealistic commanders, or commanders with a bigger picture of timelines, or just other lives depending on your ill fated attack. But as far as the game goes, have fun, find the angle to crack the nut and watch the clock. No scenario should be impossible, that would be wrong, and if that's the case yes it should be corrected. I see what you mean by add 25pdrs, in some cases add 25 minutes... I've flat out asked people how the hell they beat that too.
No doubt. I think however much of this came down to misunderstandings and usually if men actually engaged eachother with small arms they were on a relatively peripheral sector of the front or someone screwed up. This is part of the reason why field officers just falsified AARs so much. Many officers simply could not and would not send their men into situations knowing a full blood bath was inevitable. The reasons were varied, sometimes for politics like not wanting loss of a company to endanger that promotion or get you sent back to the states for "stress". Not wanting to piss off an angry and armed party representative of the Nazis/Arrow Cross/NKVD/Black Shirts/etc demanding more attacks. Other times and more frequently that anyone seems to admit, the reasons were more empathetic, like just not wanting to see people you know get massacred by a pair of MG42s overlooking the road they're supposed to advance up. Those MG42s are now a pair of Panzer IIIs and it was "obviously insane to press on against that" etc etc. You know this is where all those phantom "Tiger Tanks" kept coming from.
Force preservation was on everyone's mind more than CM scenarios like to imply I think and yes even on the cataclysmic Eastern Front I think this was the case much more frequently than European authors believe. Certainly disasters happened, certainly forceful commanders or incompetent commanders or forceful AND incompetent commanders existed but I chalk these guys up to a minority overall, especially as the war went on and idiots were either re-assigned or...expended.
So when we're playing CM this is the line I take now. I'm going to evaluate the situation and the tools at my disposal to solve it. If I conclude those tools are inadequate then i'm adjusting the scenario. The way I see things we're in a post S.L.A. Marshall world of military history now. CM and its scenarios oriented toward action and confrontation can still work, they just need adjustment sometimes.
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One of the issues I started having with CM scenarios myself is to become painstakingly overcautious. It was so easy for a relatively minor movement to turn into a major bloodbath a lot that I started save scumming damn near every turn just to survive.
On the hand I blame myself for taking a while to learn the basics of proper screening and the value of recon. On the other hand? I realized afterward that a number of scenarios are rather malicious or deceptive in their design, and no longer push myself to accomplish unreasonable objectives or expectations. Real life commanders would not really march their men into known bloodbaths, regardless of what all the anecdotal stuff said all the time. Two Pak40s covering a single T-junction with another pair of them covering the next road? Nope. Cease fire. Go to editor, load Allied player with more 25pdrs. That's more like it.
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5 hours ago, DerKommissar said:
The British still had dedicated tanks for the infantry, but for some strange reason didn't give them HE. I am curious what the infantry felt about the Sexton and Priest vehicles. I'm guessing those guys are the closest analogue to SU-76. Those and the M8 Scott too.
Partly reasoning. The British did studies between the wars and found that HE shot for any caliber smaller than 75mm was disappointing, often yielding less fragmentation than a hand grenade. The issue is that the British took that study on a per shot basis, and failed to consider that rapid firing HE rounds could more than make up for their low power. The British just believed a tank was supposed to park itself 600m to 1km from an enemy trench and just sit there peppering it with machine gun fire for hours while the infantry advanced on it.
A lot of the issue also came down to finance though. Mass producing a 1943 tank in 1934 would've been outrageously expensive, especially if you were going to place orders large enough to compose proper Tank Divisions which few nations could stomach, even if they thought in the 1930s that such a thing was a good idea and few did. You still had lots of old conservative Generals around who saw the tank and the airplane as gimmicks that already failed in 1918 and so anything not spent on artillery, horses, and battleships was a waste.
2 hours ago, DerKommissar said:Stuart is a honey for infantry support, indeed. Not only does it come with HE, but also canister rounds. Their effectiveness blew me away.
Pun intended. The Stuart's HE rounds are not too great no but they can still wreck machine guns and crew weapons on a lucky hit, it carries a lot of them + machine gun ammo so it can sit around plastering a position for an hour. The Stuart is great because it's little and scrappy and it could maneuver into places heavier vehicles could not so it can better keep up with the infantry. The canister round is a thing to behold and every now and then when you're lucky and the planets align it can take down a StuG or even a Panther if it gets the drop on them. Certainly the Sherman is objectively better but when i'm playing as Axis i've noticed I dread the attack of the American Weenie Tank as much as its larger, heavier sibling. Weenies imply a roast after all...
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It was the SU-76's job, but older models of the T-34 too. By 1943 the Russians were finally getting so flush with tanks that they could afford to start distributing them piecemeal to the infantry. Of course the SU-76 was also widely available and more than welcome anytime the T-34 wasn't around. The T-70 managed to cling to life here and there and i'm sure some KV-1s that had managed not to be expended thus far might also be bumming around in the infantry from time to time. Assault guns are clever stop gaps, but ultimately a stop gap for when you need more tanks but can't afford that many. The British made almost no use of them and the Americans were disappointed with the M2 half track's various assault gun mods. They ended up preferring as often as possible to give the infantry Stuarts, or even better, Shermans.
How I view most scenarios and the designers...
in Combat Mission - General Discussion
Posted · Edited by SimpleSimon
So it's been about 7 hours from this post. You calm down yet?
Ahhhh i'm just kidding. I already listed you on my /ignore. I'd address your numerous and blatant misunderstands of my posts but honestly Long I don't know you and I don't care enough to figure out what your underlying personal problems are that cause you to react like this. That's a job for the more unfortunate people closer to you and from the looks of it, they've got their hands full.